Mireille supposed that combustible conditions like morals and mental illness for the most part only really came into play in a somewhat more physical state than the wet realm from where thought descends. Even if not likewise accepted within that shoddy, communal rabbit-hutch that is the narrative known as normal, she felt that it was still perfectly acceptable to have any and every variegated notion percolate up through the porous mesh within our heads. Sure, in our world it would naturally follow that we’d feel the need for those whims to fall for us somewhere along that long, long, long circumference we’ve constructed between sacred and profane. Yet, “All thoughts are okay,” she told herself.

(As just some examples pulled from an infinite list of random mundanities that might drift towards focus, albeit these admittedly being somewhat odder fare than “I wonder what gender my first born will be,” or “Did they like the cut and color of that shirt I wore to the party last night”) if one took note that they had just moments ago been dreamily pondering a plan to commit murder; or discovered themselves in a strange reverie involving themselves engaged in an ogre-like gobble of an infant in a sandwich; or if one was considering what it would be like to have eyes on their genitalia, like a butterfly; or what it would be like to slit one’s wrists open with a razor; or if they’re struck with the thought to stick their tongue into the mouth of that old drunk who lived next door: well, “that’s just fine.” To place this into the more commonly known compartments proposed by Freud—if one were found in wonder over what it’d be like to stab one’s own mother and fuck one’s own father (or vice-versa of course, depending on gender and preference), well, it’s just fine. It’s only when these thoughts are allowed weight to fret within your head, Mireille believed, that they become something awesome: inspiring an overwhelming feeling of both reverence and fear.

Developing into a worry, there this whimsy-made-object-this-object-made-foreign will sit and calcify into a malignant stone that scrapes our interior. Yes, a stone, like that of Sisyphus and his diurnal burden: something to be dealt with daily. Worse, they’d metastasize out into other tunnels, such as language and action.

“I guess what I mean to say,” she thought, “…it’s only when they become a concern that they become a concern….”

Obsession is the engine that furrows the brow and makes us sick. Worry invites what were once riffs of little-nothings and inconsequential quirks of Homo sapiens sapiens’ cognitive arrangement to linger too long in the house of mirrors that we sometimes see as introspective consciousness. Under an awkward lens they develop deep taproots, wicked and invasive to your core. Even if you were to pinch its bitter blossom-head from the stem, even if you were to yank the stem free—there below the sod the thing remains and sprouts anew. Soon to sour into a desire to be fed, or a target for contempt—at best you’re left to keep vigil and be at-ready to denounce it.

Get thee to a nunnery, go.

or

Get thee behind me, Satan.

Perpetually in a procedure of amputation, your hobbled heart and mind prepares a palace for these hobgoblins and nourishes them with the slough left after self-recrimination: for is not anxiety its own form of adoration? It’s awful enough we feel compelled to contort and comport ourselves at-large to some temporal point of view, but to play truncheon-twirling policeman before some internal mirror was just too much. Why warp your imagination into the wraith that haunts the head, or worse, the revenant that escorts the hand? No, it was best to let the currents own these thoughts, buoy them about for your observation before they were tossed off with a chuckle. Otherwise these nothings could bludgeon and knife our lives while we curse them as fate.